


Pick You Up (when you are a frozen bat popsicle, or any other time)

by etherati



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon), 悪魔城ドラキュラ | Castlevania Series
Genre: Alucard does kind of a dumb, Always, Gen, Huddling For Warmth, Hurt/Comfort, I mean obviously right, Minor Injuries, batlucard, but he gets inside trevor's clothes as a result, but you can assume trephacard in the background, kind of, no this is actually gen?, oh and i guess they fight some demons, rated for language, totally an afterthought amirite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 23:27:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20629295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etherati/pseuds/etherati
Summary: Alucard's different forms each have advantages and disadvantages. Like, being a bat? Pretty cool! You can fly! Who cares if you have tiny hollow bones and no real mass at all and you're basically made of glass; that would NEVER COME UP, right?IE, Alucard does a dumb and Trevor and Sypha are there to pick him back up again.





	Pick You Up (when you are a frozen bat popsicle, or any other time)

*

“Where the hell _ are they _?”

Trevor doesn’t like the texture of panic he can hear in his own voice—doesn’t like having a reason to panic, doesn’t like that he’s letting it show. He reaches up, swipes a thick curtain of blood and bloodied hair away from his eye; he’s going to need his depth perception, if he doesn’t want this to deteriorate into something he likes even less.

“Steady,” Sypha warns from his left, sparking magical kindling dancing between her fingers.

In front of them, a cliffside. An unscalable, sheer as fuck cliffside, jagged with broken edges of stone like glass, with no real footholds or handholds—with no quarter for mistakes. There’s a shadowed recess up near the top; it looks like a small cave from here, but it’s actually the entrance to a vast underground cavern system. Because of course it fucking is.

Sounds like an _incredibly safe_ _place_ to send someone off into alone.

To be fair, the someone in question is a nigh-indestructible dhampir—the only reason he could reach the cavern entrance in the first place—but that isn’t going to help when the idiot gets himself completely lost down there. The night creatures, sure, whatever. They’re stragglers, not a real threat to any of them on the worst of days, but the possibility Trevor can’t shake from his mind is that Adrian might just get lost and _ never come back up_.

_ Stop it _ , he tells himself, sharply. _ Now isn’t the time. _

And it’s a good thing he’s staying focused, because it’s only a few seconds later that the four night creatures Adrian pursued into the cavern come boiling out of it again, frantic and panicked and lightly on fire but otherwise unharmed. Just _ terrified_.

Trevor doesn’t hesitate, even as it registers that he’s not seeing Adrian anywhere, neither in the mouth of the cavern nor floating out alongside it—_ not the time, not the time _—just winds the Morning Star into a complicated spiral around himself, letting Sypha’s enchantment grab hold of it on the second pass and winging the now burning, weighted end towards the cluster of demons before they can disperse. The muscles in his arms burn with the sheer force he puts into the throw, with the firm control and precision of the projectile’s path.

It flies true. The cluster of demons blows apart, dark bodies slamming into the snowbanks, the fire eating them up reflecting orange and violent against all the winter white. 

Silence, but for the crackling of flame.

The demons burn, and they don’t move, and that’s great and all. But in the instant he’d watched the blast rip through the cluster, he could swear he’d seen something small and pale blown free from them, arcing away to land in the same snow—to land just as hard. 

Distantly, he hears Sypha whoop in celebratory excitement. He ignores it for the moment, winds the chain back up as he tramples through the snow in the direction of where the mystery object had come down. It’s—it’s probably nothing, just a clump of snow that one of the creatures had snagged on its way out, or a rock—something like that. But Adrian still hasn’t shown himself, and the demons had come out of that cave like rabbits with a snake in their den—like they were being flushed out. Like they were being _ chased. _And Trevor has a feeling.

When he gets close enough, it’s plain to see that there’s something moving there, struggling in the snow, a string of faint squeaks mostly swallowed up by the sound-deadening landscape.

“Hey,” Trevor says, careful; the worst case is that he’s talking to an injured rabbit or something, like a lunatic. There’s no one here to see it. “Is that you?”

The squeaks trail off; the motion stills as well. Then it starts again, redoubles in intensity, a pair of pale yellow wings flopping up onto the surface of the snow, making a valiant effort to haul its fuzzy white body out of the drift.

Trevor shakes his head; relief pours out of him like breath. “You idiot,” he says, treading closer, reaching down to give the wingclaws something to latch onto. “That was way too close; you almost went up with them.”

And Trevor’s about to congratulate him on coming through yet another horrible mess unscathed, when he tries to lift him by the wings like usual and the sad little bat just about _ screams. _

“Shit, what’s…” Trevor lowers them both back down, dropping onto one knee. “What’s wrong, are you—oh,” he cuts himself off, because as he gently spreads Adrian’s fragile-looking wings, one of them is just not hanging correctly. The longest bone of the wing’s span, the one that roughly corresponds to a human forearm, has been snapped cleanly in two. The rest of the wing from that point on is limp and dragging. “That… looks like it hurts.”

An angry string of squeaks then. He can hear Sypha calling to him from over the snowy rise, getting more worried by the second.

“Okay, okay,” he says, holding his hands up, placating. “Stating the obvious, I know. Here, let me…” he trails off, making a sort of cupping gesture to show his intent, then moves in to actually scoop the pathetic little sky-rat up in both hands. 

Shit, he’s really cold. Not normal dhampir cold, but _ tossed into a snowbank with no thermal mass _ cold. His fur is all mussed, bruising visible through it in patches, and one ear has a burnt out notch that looks incredibly painful. He’s a mess, and he’s _ too fucking cold _. Even if he has the energy to change back…

“Guess what,” Trevor says, quieting his usual boisterous bullshit, doing his best not to let the worry into his voice. None of this is life threatening—except for the cold, and that’s a _ maybe_. “You’ve earned yourself a shirt ride.”

And he’s just getting Adrian tucked away inside the front of his tunic—the tiny little body bulging the fabric out where his family crest sits, cradled against Trevor’s human heat, any squeaky complaints he’d managed at first trailing off into vaguely pleased burbles as that heat starts sinking into his stupidly fragile bones—when Sypha makes it into his line of vision, waving frantically.

“Trevor!” she shouts, clearly now in a panic. “Where’s—”

“It’s okay,” he says, rubbing one finger down the center of the bat’s forehead, gentle. His finger has a gash on it, he notices idly, just a minor thing—and he turns his hand to offer the cut to Adrian without even a conscious thought. The tiny tongue tickles a little, as he laps at the wound. “I’ve got him.”

“Oh,” Sypha says, drawing up close. “I didn’t realize he’d—why don’t you change back?” she asks Adrian directly, leaning in. As if he can fucking _ answer _ in anything other than more annoyed noises.

“Yeah, he’s like a block of ice in here,” Trevor answers instead, wincing, doing his best to keep Adrian sheltered from the wind. “I don’t know if he _ can _ change, right now, and it might be better to wait. He’s roughed up pretty good. Got a broken… wing? Arm? Whatever, it’s not fun.”

“The night creatures?”

Trevor frowns, guilt lashing through him as sharp as any whip. “The blast, I think.”

Sypha eyes them both, reaches to rub a thumb between the batty little ears, a soothing gesture. She nods to his hand, where Adrian’s little licks have slowed down. “I think that’s dried up.”

Trevor shrugs, rubs at the cut with his other thumb until it stings and starts seeping again, offers it back. Maybe this _ is _ a little weird, it finally filters through, but he’s also walking through a snowstorm with a sentient bat in his shirt, which is a lot weirder.

“Is that going to help?” Sypha asks, as they turn to start the long walk back to the nearest village; the wind is picking up, the sun’s going down, and the temperature is dropping with it. The tiny body pressed to his skin is, at least, shivering again, which is a much better sign than people tend to realize. “It’s such a small amount…”

“I think maybe he needs less like this?” Trevor muses aloud. “There’s less to heal, so…”

“That sounds like a cheat that he would have told us about, if it worked.”

An indignant squeak from the depths of his tunic, and Trevor doesn’t speak bat but he’s pretty sure Adrian’s saying something like _ how was I supposed to know, I don’t just hang out as a bat for fun. _

“Okay, okay,” Sypha laughs, stretching up to thread an arm around Trevor’s shoulders, dragging her much heavier outer robe around all of them; Trevor started this hunt properly outfitted, but his cloak got shredded somewhere around the same time his scalp did. “I’m sorry! We will discuss it further when you can speak again, yes?”

A chirping affirmative, and then the cold lump in his shirt relaxes a little, sinking back into the warmth. Trevor thumbs the cut open again, keeps his hand tucked in alongside Adrian, mumbles something to him like _ you’ve got teeth, keep it open yourself, you lazy arsehole, _ that somehow really means _ take what you need; we’ve got you. _

Twilight is threatening now; it’s at least a mile back to the village, but there’s been no fresh snowfall and their tracks are easy enough to backtrack, and there’s enough warmth between him and Sypha for all three of them—and there’s got to be some good stew and ale waiting for them at the inn, some chairs around the fire. He can almost smell it from here.

Trevor curled protectively around Adrian, and Sypha curled protectively around them both, they walk—they leave behind the burning demons and the winter wilds and the danger and fear, and they walk.

*

*

**Author's Note:**

> yeah this came entirely from the drawing, which itself was a late-night whim. but it was a cute whim!


End file.
